Michael Barbaro

That's not who we are.

We exist to fight President Trump.

And if that means we have to fight ourselves in a kind of civil war, if that means we're going to take out our anger at our own Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, so be it.

We will be the party of fighting Trump, period.

One of the defining forces for Democrats in Trump's second term is that voters are angry at their own party.

And I think that's part of what gets us into the shutdown.

It's part of why they're going to be disappointed by the results of the shutdown.

And we're going to see what that looks like next year.

That anger, that energy, that has worked for parties before to take back power.

And so I think Democrats are trying to tread carefully here.

They want to keep the voters angry, but they would like to direct the anger at the other party.

At the moment, it's being directed internally.

And that's getting back to that self-owned moment, right?

Which is last week, you saw angry voters turn out

and vote out Republicans all across the country.

And the concern is, what if we've turned that anger back at us now?

And as quickly as possible, they're going to try to harness that energy, that anger, that frustration and say, we fought the good fight here.

You wanted us to fight.

We did the fight.

And even if we didn't get everything we wanted, we showed you that we can and would, and that the details of how this ended are going to be forgotten far sooner than the fact that they had the fight in the first place.